Does this also work for Word 2016? I could not find the respective path to access that option.

I've been trying to do this now (i.e. July 2023) on Word 2016, and while I can remove w:date="[\d\W]*\w[\d\W]*\w" from both the document.xml and comments.xml files, it's not removing the date from the tracked documents. I've looked through the other xml files in the word folder, but can't find it hiding anywhere there. Any ideas where it might be logged?

Not having been able to get rid of the timestamps using the method described above, I've come up with an alternative approach:

1. Inspect document, and remove personal information.
2. Check 'Allow this information to be saved in your file.
3. Convert .docx to .zip, and open folder
4. Open 'comments.xml' and 'document.xml' with Notepad++
5. Replace w:author="Author" with w:author=[Your Name]
6. Copy the adjusted xml files back into the zipped folder
7. Re-convert .zip to .docx

This removes any timestamps, but still shows comments and changes under your own name. Of course, if several different people have made tracked changes or comments, it'll remove their names, and put all changes under your own name. But this could be gotten around by comparing files, as suggested in an earlier comment in the thread.